Ghost Country

“In a sober and carefully understated voice I say: this is a damn good poet.” — Al Purdy on Backing into Heaven

Ghost Country enters the difficult electric air between cultures and lovers, alive to the fierce exoticism of desire but also to its confusions, its political and personal dissonances. Set in contemporary China, these poems spring from the intense anguished observations of the lover of a culture who is also, inescapably, the outsider. Lyrical, candid, tough, they are rooted in a passionate honesty that refuses to sentimentalize or look away. In Steve Noyes we have a writer who has steadily hewed to his own course, producing writing with its own unforgettable tang.

I turned from you. One look back
your face wet, eyes downcast
then one look back ramified, became
a city of return, where mind as emperor
holds court endlessly with the heart.

From “The Middle Kingdom”

“Ghost Country is not so much a book of poetry as the rangefinder of an exquisite camera, in which two worlds merge to form a single, rich vision. To read this book is to walk into this vision, to breathe its air, to speak its language. It’s a journey worth taking, one that will linger long after the last page is turned.” — Terence Young

Steve Noyes has published two previous books of poetry, Backing into Heaven (1986), and Hurriya (1996), as well as Cities of India, a collection of short fiction. Of Hurriya, Stan Dragland observed that it was a “luminous and unusual book”. Noyes taught English at Qing Hua University in Beijing and in Dong Yan Jiao, a small town outside Beijing, in 1997-1998. He grew up in Winnipeg and lives in Victoria, BC.

AUTHOR

Steve Noyes

Steve Noyes has published six books of poetry and fiction, in voices as various as Omar Khayyam, basketball star Allen Iverson, a Chaucer professor, and a 9th century Chinese bureaucrat’s. Al Purdy said after reading his first book, “Noyes is a damn good poet.” In Ghost Country, Steve also explored the distances to China; in Morbidity and Ornament, he mixed his formal, tight poems in Chinese with his manic narrative English poems about the prairies, anxiety dreams, Islamic themes, and animals. It is Just That Your House is So Far Away is his first novel. Raised in Winnipeg, and a graduate of UBC’s MFA Writing program and Carleton’s journalism school, Noyes has published more than 100 poems, stories and book reviews. His writing appears regularly in such magazines and newspapers as The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, Event, The Globe and Mail, Queen’s Quarterly, and the Vancouver Sun. He has won writing grants from the BC Arts Council and the Canada Council. He has also worked as Foreign Expert, policy analyst, parking-lot attendant, printing press grunt, disabilities advocate, sessional lecturer, correspondence writer, plywood mill labourer, and editor. Over the past decade, Noyes has worked and studied in Beijing, Shanghai, Taibei, Qingdao, and a little town north of Beijing. He has travelled extensively across China. He studied Mandarin at Fudan University in Shanghai, and holds an International Mandarin Proficiency Certificate. He is married to the poet Catherine Greenwood, and currently makes his home in Victoria, where he is puzzling out another novel and working for the BC Ministry of Health.